In many instances, a search engine is utilized to search for information. In general, a search engine is a special program (e.g., computer executable instructions) designed to help find files (e.g., web pages, images, text . . . ) stored on a computer, for example, a public server or on one's own personal computer. A typical search engine allows a user to invoke a query for files that satisfy particular criteria, for example, files that contain a given word or phrase in a title or body. Web search engines generally work by storing information about a large number of web pages retrieved from the World Wide Web (WWW) through a web crawler, or an automated web browser, which follows essentially every link it locates. The contents of each web page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed, for example, words can be extracted from the titles, headings, or special fields called meta-tags. Data about web pages is stored in an index database for use in later queries. Some search engines store (or cache) all or part of a source page as well as information about the web pages. When a user invokes a query through the web search engine by providing key words, the web search engine looks up the index and provides a listing of web pages that best-match the criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document's title and/or parts of the text.
In general, the usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the results it presents to a user and the presentation of such results. While there can be numerous web pages that include a particular word or phrase, some web pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others. Most search engines employ methods to rank the results to provide a “best” result first. How a search engine decides which pages are the best matches, and what order the results should be shown in, varies widely from one engine to another. Conventionally, the technique for displaying what the search engine considers relevant information about a web page to a user can be based on a static ranking and a dynamic ranking. In other words, query results are traditionally ranked based on the number of links and the traffic associated with such links. Thus, a particular web page can be ranked very high solely because a link within such web page has a relatively high amount of traffic. Specifically, a static ranking can involve seeing how many other web pages link to a web page as well as the density of matches to the search term on the page. Dynamic ranking can involve ranking a page slightly higher every time a user clicks on that link after it appears in search results.
As of late, there is an increase and rapid movement toward gathering and indexing non-web content by search engines to allow access and availability via the Internet. In particular, books are books are increasingly being scanned and indexed by major search portals. A typical problem associated with gathering massive amounts of data is the ability of a user to ascertain which of the books presented in search results are relevant and applicable to a query. Conventional search systems can rank and present search results in an algorithmic order that tends to be somewhat useful to the user, yet users need a more efficient manner to make their own relevance filtering of search results based on visual information that they did not have before.